Sony Looking at Online Pass for their Games

August 24, 2010Written by Adam G

Whether you love it or loath it, it’s certainly hard to deny that the used game market is a huge money maker for retailers. The problem is though that none of this money makes its way back to the publishers and so, understandably, some publishers are as mad as hell, and they’re not going to take this any more!

EA started off this trend of adding incentive to purchase games new -instead of second hand – with its online pass system: buy the game new, and you’ll have get a code to access the game’s network features; buy the game used, and you have to pay to unlock them instead. Think of it as an online pass-ive aggressive way of trying to curb the used games market and now it seems Sony may be about to try the same thing.

Speaking with GamesIndustry.biz, Andrew House, president of SCEE, stated that they are “broadly supportive” of this system.

“On the principle of making online portions of the game available or unlocked from the disc-based release for a fee, we’re broadly supportive of that… And we’re exploring actively the same option for our own content.”

Andrew House was eager to stress, however, that this wouldn’t be a segue into charging for “basic online play”.

“That’s something we have to talk about a lot more and we struggle with a little bit because we feel very vindicated and base a lot of the success of PSN today – a 70 per cent connection rate across consoles – on the fact we’ve removed that major initial barrier to entry,”

What do you think readers, would this stop you buying Killzone 3 or MotorStorm: Apocalypse pre-owned come next February?